RIP - J.D. Salinger

Apparently, J.D. Salinger has died. While sad, this isn't exactly a shock. I originally read through Salinger's work in my teens, but a few years ago, decided to go back to see if it would still appeal to me in my late-20s. Much to my surprise, I actually thought it was even better then than it had been in high school. I think Catcher in the Rye was the one that was most to my tastes in my teens; not surprisingly, while I didn't find it weak or bad, it didn't resonate in the same way the second time. That said, Nine Stories, Frannie and Zooey, and Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters/Seymour: An Introduction were even more impressive the second time around. Too often, so-called the production of "literary giants" doesn't really hold up, but Salinger, perhaps due to his minimal output, was absolutely deserving of that title. Salinger was a titan, and in that regard, his passing is sad (if inevitable); but with Seymour, Zooey, Holden, the Glass family, and others still commonly read, it's hard to be too upset.

Another Philip Dick Movie? Color Me Skeptical

It has come to my attention that yet another Philip K. Dick work is being turned into a film. This time, it's one of my three favorite Dick books, Radio Free Albemuth. I am less than certain that this is remotely a good idea.

It's not exactly that Dick's movies and stories are unfilmable - Minority Report wasn't terrible, Total Recall is actually fairly good for what it is, and Blade Runner is an absolute classic. But the latter two really diverge greatly from their original source material, and even Minority Report is a 2+hour telling of a short story, so there's a lot added on. (And I haven't seen A Scanner Darkly, but heard it was fairly good, too).

But I just don't see how Radio Free Albemuth will work as a movie. It's not just that my skepticism is based on a paranoia-filled Cold-War dystopia during a political administration that strongly represents Dick Nixon's and Joseph McCarthy's love-child (not exactly the same political-cultural climate we are in now). It's not even that Alanis Morisette will apparently play a major role in the film. It's also that I just don't see how you narrate the book in film format. I don't think I'm giving too much away when I say that the book hinges in no small part on a major narrative shift that starts with "Philip Dick" (the character)'s internal point of view in the first third of the book, shifts to his friend Nicholas Brady's point of view in the second, and returns to Dick's in the third. And those shifts in POV are one of the most seamless, simple, and yet innovative ways to shift narrative voices in a book that I've ever read. It's actually kind of central to the way the story is told, and I just don't see how that works in film. If you're not looking "through" Dick's and Brady's eyes, then the story is going to be radically different.

Again, I'm not saying the film will be terrible. But I can't help but think that, if it's to succeed, it will have to take the Blade Runner path and basically very loosely follow the story it's based upon; in other words, it will have to use Dick's ideas as a launching point, but become it's own story separate from the book. And given that for every Blade Runner there has been a Paycheck, I'm not holding my breath.

And as a final comment, please - if you've never read any Philip Dick, go out and get something by him now. I'd recommend Radio Free Albemuth, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, Dr. Bloodmoney, Confessions of a Crap Artist, The Man in the High Castle, or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as good starting points, though honestly I could recommend another 8-12 beyond that. Suffice to say, there are lots of excellent books by him, in addition to his short stories.

UPDATE...Apparently, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said is also becoming a film. That may be a bit easier than Radio Free Albemuth, but not by much. Either these screenwriters/directors are amazingly good and clever, or these are going to be some major film fiascos.

10 Lauded Works/Authors I Hope to Read One Day

To bring the "book-posts" to a nice, neat trilogy, I thought it would be fun (and kill time at work) to also list some of the "great works" that I've never read, but would really, really like to get around to at some point. No doubt I'm forgetting some, and there are some serious gaps (no women authors?), so I'm open to suggestions from others as well. But here, in no particular order, are 10 "classics" I'm really eager to read (but will probably not get around to anytime soon).

1.) Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time - This probably seems like the most pretentious possible pick, but really it's sheer curiosity - for all of the references and praise this work gets (including occasional hilarious pop-culture mentions), I've never met anybody who's actually read it and who can opine on it, and I'm really curious what the fuss is about. So hopefully, sometime in my life (probably post-retirement), I will be able to at least sit down and start Proust.

2.) Anything by Cormac McCarthy - I've heard so much great stuff about him, yet have never read anything; indeed, my only "McCarthy" contact is the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men, and the consensus seems to be that's McCarthy's worst book. I'd probably start with Blood Meridian, but the whole border trilogy and the Road all seem equally fascinating.

3.) Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow - Because Pynchon's work seems like it might be something I really enjoy, and I feel like if I'm going to read him, I might as well start with what appears to be his most challenging work.

4.) David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest - Long before his suicide, this book intrigued me simply for its title and its girth everytime I handled it working at a bookstore. The praise heaped upon his writing-style (fiction and non-fiction) has only heightened my curiosity.

5.) Par Lagerkvist, Barabbas - A probing take on religion and the story of Jesus, narrated by a less-than-noble man who was present, written by a Swede? How could this not sound interesting?

6.) William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying - Because I somehow have avoided ever having to read Faulkner in my life, and this one sounds as interesting as any of his works does to me.

7.) William Styron, A Tidewater Morning - The themes, while far from unusual, can still be compelling, and, in an extremely random justification, my family used to vacation in that area every summer, so I'd like to see a literary treatment of the tidewater region of VA/NC.

8.) Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain - Because I'm a dork, and a 700-page novel using a tuberculosis sanatorium as an allegory for early-20th century Europe really seems fascinating to me.

9.) Knut Hamsun, Hunger - Somebody once described Hamsun's work to me as "the literary equivalent of a Munch painting." While I'm not necessarily the biggest fan (or opponent) of German expressionism, the description alone has kept my interest piqued for years.

10.) Jorge Luis Borges, any collection of short stories - I openly admit that my familiarity with (non-Brazilian) Latin American literature is woefully inadequate - I've never read anything other than a few short stories of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, for example. And while I know relatively little about the famous authors of South America, Borges's writings seem like as good a place as any to begin.

10 Lauded Books I Hate

To do the reverse of the lists below, I thought I'd put out 10 books that are generally highly lauded or canonical that I pure straight hated. Literary tastes are of course subjective, and I openly admit that I prefer 20th century literature over any other time period in general, so this list is appropriately skewed in that direction (though the 20th century isn't off the hook). So my 10 most overrated literary works, in rough order:

1) Pride and Prejudice - Words do not describe the contempt I have for this book. There are many movies you watch where you think, "I want those two hours of my life back." This is the only book I feel that way about.

2) The Bluest Eye - Some day, I will read something else by Toni Morrison, simply because I still can't believe my reaction against this book was so violent, and that there must have been something going on in my life at that time that made me hate it so much. But I'm not reading this one again.

3) Wieland: Or, the Transformation - Charles Brockden Brown is considered by many to be the first American novelist. You can make a strong case; what is not up for debate is how horrible the first American novels were.

4) Madame Bovary - She could not have died fast enough. Like Anna Karenina, only without any of the good parts, and an even more ridiculous dramatization of the worst parts. Oh, and spoiler alert - she dies. But not fast enough.

5) The Scarlet Letter - By now, it's probably becoming pretty clear that I'm just not that big a fan of pre-20th century literature. Still, I think this may be one of the most overrated books in all of American literature; useful for letting us get insight into a particular literary style, but god, it's an awful, boring literary style.

6) For Whom the Bell Tolls - The lesson I learned from this book? Hemingway's method and subject-matter is much more effective in short story form than in 400 page novels.

7) The Fountainhead - Only as I grew older did I realize just how horrible the "philosophy" behind Ayn Rand's "books" was. Fortunately, even as a teenager, I could recognize the stupid "plot," ridiculous preaching, stilted writing, and just general awfulness of this book, thus sparing me from also trying to plow through Atlas Shrugs (or anything else by her).

8) Romeo and Juliet - No doubt, this is because of the over-hype this play and story have gotten over the last 400 years. Still, over-exposure makes me hate it even more than Shakespeare's worst plays - at least their novelty makes them interesting.

9) The Good Earth - I may read it again someday, because I suspect it may not be as bad as I felt it was when I read it. Still, few books have left me caring so little about what happens to the protagonists, and unimpressed by either the story or the style. It's not much different from Nectar in a Sieve, but I thought the latter was way more successful at what it did than Buck's work.

10) Lust - OK, so Elfreide Jelinek isn't exactly "lauded," but she did win the Nobel Prize in literature a few years ago. No question, her wordplay is top-notch. Unfortunately, the meme of "sex is a horrible repressive system that denies women any agency, and death is the only escape" simply is not worth being repeated over 250 pages (not to mention that I just don't buy it - but hey, I'm a man, so I guess Jelinek would expect that response from me as another example of my male authoritarianism.).

Trend's 15 Books in 15 Minutes

Liking Sarah's post on books below, I figured I'd go ahead and do mine, too. Having basically spent 4 years of my life during grad school reading no fiction, it's really sort of "things I read in high school/undergrad," and "things I've gotten into recently." Here they are, in no particular order.

1.) One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - one of the few pieces of fiction I've actually read more than once. I think a lot of the "counter-culture" stuff is horribly overrated and dated, and I realize a lot of people could level the same charges to this book, but it's still one of my favorites ever. Mercifully, I read the book before the movie, so that I have my own version of McMurphy in my head, rather than Jack Nicholson.

2.) The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter - another of the rare "worth reading more than once" books for me. Carson McCullers is one of the most underrated American authors, and should be included in any discussion of "greatest Southern writers."

3.) Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said - I love a lot of Philip Dick's work, but this may be his best to me.

4.) Heart of Darkness - It's probably cliche, but what Joseph Conrad did with English while not being a native-born English speaker is still mind-blowing.

5.) Catch-22 - had I read this before and not after One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, I would probably feel about it the way I do about Kesey's work. Still, it's one of the 15 best things I ever read, and definitely contributed greatly to my sense of humor.

6.) Her Smoke Rose Up Forever - fortunately, James Tiptree's (Alice Sheldon) work has recently been re-published in an anthology, and it's some of the most powerful science fiction of the twentieth century, with an added bonus of bringing in gender in ways that few sci-fi authors really do.

7.) Native Son - This was one of those books in high school that everybody but me absolutely hated.

8.) The Ghost Writer - while I like all of Philip Roth's Zuckerman books, this is probably my favorite of the Roth books I've read thus far (though I haven't read a lot of his "great" works, specifically American Pastoral).

9.) East of Eden - Grapes of Wrath is a better social work, but I just love the biblical grandeur combined w/verbal simplicity of East of Eden.

10.) God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater - I went through nearly all of Vonnegut's works as a teenager (which seems like a very teenager-thing to do in retrospect), and while I may have liked a few others more at the time (Breakfast of Champions, Slaughterhouse Five, Cat's Cradle), for whatever reason, this is the one that really stuck with me.

11.) The USA Trilogy - literary and narrative experimentation can fall flat, or can be outstanding; Dos Passos' trilogy is probably one of the best of examples of experimentation and innovation at its finest.

12.) Grande Sertao: Veredas - the greatest piece of literature in Portuguese, ever (including Saramango). Unfortunately, Guimaraes Rosa's innovation and playing with language and narration (600 pages, no chapters, no breaks) also makes it damn-near untranslatable.

13.) The Big Sleep - Chandler has better works, perhaps (Lady in the Lake, The Long Goodbye), but this was the first I read, and the first that got me into good noir fiction from the 30s, 40s, and 50s.

14.) Vidas Secas - Another great Brazilian work about a poor family in the dry backlands of Brazil - just a great, simple, beautiful, and heart-breaking story.

15.) The Tin Drum - To this day, I have no clue what at least half of that book was about. But damn if I didn't love it from start to finish. I may even go back some day and give it another go, just to see if I can make more sense of it than I did when I was 16.

15 books in 15 minutes

In keeping with the literary theme of my last post, I'm stealing this meme from Natalia because I love her. And because I love you, and we have good discussions about books on this here blog. So!

Instructions: Don’t take too long to think about it. List 15 books you’ve read that will always stick with you — the first 15 you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. Copy the instructions into your own note, and be sure to tag the person who tagged you. (In the interest of staying true to the exercise, I listed the books first and then went back and wrote descriptions)

1. Les Miserables. This book more than any other has been a huge part of me. I was a kid when my parents went to see the musical and brought home the soundtrack, and I became obsessed. My grandmother, the one who always wanted me to put down the books that I read obsessively at meals and in bed, bet me that I couldn't read the book. I was 9. She brought me a huge hardcover unabridged copy--I'm not quite sure where that copy is now--and I read it in 3 days, at meals, in bed, in every spare second. Of course at age 9, 90% of it went over my head, but I go back to it over and over. I tattooed a quote from it on my back. I find something new and beautiful every time I read it. One day I'll learn French and read it in French. I swear.

2. Ulysses. I guess I already blogged about it once, so I don't know if I have to say much more than it pushed the boundaries of what fiction and language could do in my mind. That said, I too have not read Finnegans Wake.

3. The Thief's Journal I came to Jean Genet because of a silly goth magazine's photo spread with quotes from Funeral Rites. Funeral Rites is a seriously fucked-up book, and an amazingly beautiful one, but The Thief's Journal has stuck with me longer. Genet makes the hideous and abject beautiful, and makes the beautiful abject. More people probably know his plays, but I love his fiction. Another reason I need to learn French.

4. The Savage Detectives. I read this last summer after hearing an NPR segment on Roberto Bolano. I came away from the book staggered, like I hadn't been by an author in years. His fierce devotion to his artistic and political ideals reminded me that art is as revolutionary as politics, and writing fiction is a worthwhile occupation.

5. Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail. Hunter S. Thompson is like Jesus, in that the man is pretty awesome, but I can't stand most of his followers. No, seriously, I hate people who start immediately talking about the drug references in Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, because they miss out on the real reason Thompson was so fucking great: the man could WRITE, and he could see through hypocrisy no matter how out of his mind he was on whatever substances he could smoke, drink, or snort. The best political journalist America's ever seen?

6. Lolita. Is also a cliche, but I don't care. No one should've ever tried to make a movie out of it: Lolita is the consummate novel, from a man who spent plenty of time messing around with the idea of a novel, stretching it to its limits and beyond (Pale Fire). The story in Lolita can't be told properly in any other medium but the written word.

7. The Sound of Waves. I also came to Mishima from that same silly goth magazine--so my goth years were good for something. The first book of his I read was Forbidden Colors, probably his best book, but the one that hits me like a ton of bricks is this one, a deceptively simple first-love story.

8. Written on the Body. Jeannette Winterson is a whole lot of awesome as far as I'm concerned, but Written on the Body is a standout for many reasons, chief among them that it's a love story in which you never know the gender of the main character. You know that the lover is a woman, but the "I" who speaks is so perfectly concealed that it becomes a game within the book, trying to find a clue. And yet it doesn't compromise the story a bit.

9. Namedropper. Emma Forrest's first novel, written when she was maybe 19; I read it when I was in college and it was the first time that I really saw myself in a character. Normally, I read books to get out of my own life, but this one was so much like me.

10. The Sound and the Fury. So Faulkner might be another cliche. So what? I still love him, and always will. I love the way this whole book revolves around Caddy and yet she is only a ghost; that everyone thinks they know her and yet it's so immediately clear that no one does.

11. Shanghai Baby. Wei Hui's first novel, I think, I bought because it was "banned in China." It's not very shocking at all, but it was the first book that I read where I thought, "I could do this."

12. Jazz. I did not properly appreciate Toni Morrison in school, despite going through several of her books, a few of them repeatedly. It wasn't until I took an audiobook of Jazz from my local (tiny) library for a road trip that I realized why people love her. What most of my favorite books have in common is a love for and experiment with language, and this one is no exception. It reads like music.

13. Blonde. Joyce Carol Oates does Marilyn Monroe, and I melt and want to cry just thinking about how heartwrenching this book is. Another one that someone unfortunately tried to adapt to the screen, and another one that should only be read.

14. The Sandman. Because I am me, I have comics on this list. I only have comics that were written by one person for their span, and the Sandman counts. I cannot make a list of books I love without including Neil Gaiman, and I cannot be honest and say that I like any of his prose novels more than Sandman. The Sandman comics are about stories and storytelling, about the nature of fiction and characters and myths and of course dreams, and they will change your life.

15. Local. Another comic, and my favorite since Sandman, I think. It's a collection of short stories about one girl, and when put together (in a gorgeous hardcover that I still don't have) it's a story of a life told in the moments that define it. It is also the perfect comic for people who don't read comics. Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly are wonderful.

(OK, it took me a lot more than 15 minutes to write blurbs about all of these, but I did come up with the list in less than 15. Your turn, now...)

It Has Been Brought to My Attention that America Has Some Great Authors Who Do NOT Live on the East Coast

Between Erik's (very fair) comments in this post, and this NY Times editorial on Wallace Stegner today, I've become aware that I've never really read much "great" literature from authors from the west. There are many reasons for this, both professionally (I almost never picked up any fiction before completing comps), as well as my own neuroses (I rarely read anything by living authors, with Philip Roth being the major exception) and tastes (I just don't care about fishing, so something like A River Runs Through It seems like something that would bore me - yes, it may be about other things besides fishing, but everybody presents fishing as a major recurrent narrative structure in it, and I just don't care). Hell - I don't usually buy into the "East Coast bias" conspiracy theories (particularly in sports - nothing was as satisfying last year as hearing West Coast writers say, "nobody picked the Angels because of East Coast bias!", and then watching the Angels, who were highly overrated in a terrible division, get ousted in the first round), but in the case of literature, I think upon reflection that you could at least make a decent argument of regionalism and coastal snobbery. I may even be a product of that publishing snobbery, to some extent. Sure, I've read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (one of my all-time favorites), and I'm aware of Larry McMurtry (whose books also seem uninteresting to my tastes); I've read a bit of Willa Cather (in high school), and I'd like to read Cormac McCarthy's border trilogy and The Road sometime. All in all, though, I just don't know who the west's "great" authors are.

So, to our readers who know more about this than I do......which authors from the West should I (or anybody else) read?

Philip Roth Is Apparently Not "Good Enough" for Swedes

I've long thought that Philip Roth was more than deserving of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Certainly, he doesn't need the Nobel Prize to validate his career to me, himself, or anybody else; I just thought it would be nice. My belief in this only increased when I read some of the works of some recent Nobel winners, whose work was OK, but was really nothing "amazing" or "revolutionary" (Elfreide Jelinek, Toni Morrison, and Orhan Pamuk jump to mind here).

However, much as I love Roth's work, I always wondered if his focus on Jewish-American identity kept him from getting the award thus far. I always figured that his works could still appeal to a broad spectrum of people throughout the world due to the issues of generational change and religious-ethnic identities beyond the simple "Jewish-American" mantra, in the same way that Steinbeck's chronicles of the average American's struggles could be (and are) easily universalized. But I also suspected that a board of Swedish judges would be less-than-sympathetic or understanding.

It may be too early to tell, but it certainly looks like my latter suspicion was correct, and Roth probably won't be getting that award any time soon, simply leaving him to join the ranks of Tolstoy, Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov as amazing writers the Nobel committee did not deem "worthy."

Historical Image of the Day

Eugene O'Neill at a rehearsal of "The Iceman Cometh," 1946